Monthly archives for March, 2017

Meihuei Kao, A-2998, a non-confidential whole body member, was pronounced on February 19, 2017 in Tijuana, Mexico. Meihuei became Alcor’s 150th patient on February 22, 2017.

Josh Lado, Alcor’s Medical Response Director, received a phone call from an Alcor director on Sunday, February 19, 2017. The director explained that they had received a phone call from a family attorney stating their client wanted to sign their mother up to be cryopreserved. Josh contacted the attorney and the patient’s son. Her son stated the patient was in Tijuana, Mexico getting treatment for kidney failure. The patient was not doing well and was very close to death. Josh explained that Alcor rarely accepts last-minute, third-party cases and that several criteria must be met, with final approval from the board of directors being required.

While speaking with family, Meihuei Kao passed away from kidney failure. Meihuei was immediately placed in the hospitals morgue with ice all around her to begin the cooling process. The patient was placed on dry ice on February 20th. She was transported from Tijuana to a San Diego Funeral Home. Alcor personnel transported her to Scottsdale on February 22nd. Meihuei was transferred into liquid nitrogen vapor cool down on February 24th. Cool down was completed on February 28th and Meihuei is now in long-term storage and care.

In January we celebrated the cryopreservation of the first person, James Bedford, who remains preserved at Alcor today. Severalpublications covered the milestone, and of course Alcor has writtenextensively about Bedford as well. Bedford became an Alcor patient in 1991.

Southern Cryonics is getting ready to break ground on a new cryonics facility in Australia. When completed, it would be the first storage facility not only in Australia, but in the entire southern hemisphere.

Cryonics seldom gets long pieces written about it in major media outlets, but Bloomberg has recently been paying attention. They sent a journalist to Russia to write a very comprehensive piece on KrioRus back in November. That was followed up by a cryonics themed podcast which, despite the negative title, ended up being a very thoughtful, positive discussion about cryonics and transhumanism targeted at folks less familiar with the concepts.

Obviously this blog is focused on Alcor and cryonics, but organ preservation is an important area of research that touches many of the same technologies necessary for human cryopreservation. It’s also an area that the White House has started paying attention to, and now the Pentagon is allocating $160 million to programs aimed at preserving donor organs.

Cryobiologists haven’t historically written a lot of positive pieces about cryonics, but as technology improves, that may change. See this recent piece in Cosmos Magazine. While the contents aren’t likely to be new to an Alcor member, that a lecturer working in cryopreservation at a research institution is saying it is. Those of us who believe the most important thing cryonics advocates can do is shift the Overton window get excited by articles like this.

Research continues into new techniques for preserving and thawing tissues. Recent work at the University of Minnesota suggests that there’s a way to rapidly thaw cryopreserved tissue without damage. The thawing process is considered the most dangerous part of reversible cryopreservation due to ice formation as the tissue warms towards the freezing point. Obviously more work needs to be done before we have something that is practical outside the lab. The full paper can be read here.